Java > Scala

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 12/4/11 10:34 PM, Brad Anderson wrote:
>     What's the plan with doing I/O and other irreversible actions during
>     STM transactions then?
>
>     Andrei
>
>
> One of the PyPy guys briefly answers this in the comments of this
> article on the subject of PyPy and removal of the GIL.
> http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2011/06/global-interpreter-lock-or-how-to-kill.html

Unfortunately the post and the discussion are not very informative. The 
approaches discussed (write() finishes a transaction and starts another 
one) are rather naive and fail to address even the simplest scenarios 
involving e.g. interleaving input and output.

Anyway, my comment is strictly on that discussion, not on the entire 
effort within the Python community. When we were working on D's 
concurrency model Bartosz pushed for a while quite strongly in favor of 
STM, but I predicted it won't pan out, at least not in time for us to 
rely on it. It was 2008 and the issues with STM were by then understood 
but not resolved properly. It's still too early to make a verdict one 
way or another. There's a steady stream of related publications coming. 
It will be interesting to see what happens.


Andrei